Well, I'm trying to install Gentoo on my eeePC (1.6GHz Atom N270). It came with a 4GB SSD.
Initially Xandros was on the machine. It kept on running out of disk space on upgrades => BAD.
I have eeebuntu on it currently. It works pretty well, and still has its own package manager, upgrades, and all.

But it's drawing off another archive and Ubuntu's support life is limited, and would like all my machines to be based off the same source.

I would like to get my eee to be self hosting (meaning, it can build itself). I'm trying to keep it in 4GB and still have 750MB or so to spare for general usage -- to be the same same as eeebuntu -- which so far seems somewhat difficult. Portage seems to be the biggest problem to have all of it installed on the eee.

Just wondering what others have done to keep disk consumption down. The CPU is not spectacular but should be able to do compile-upgrades (and it will have my other Gentoo machines to distcc from) -- which is why I'd like to keep portage with the machine. Distfiles will have to be kept clean of course.

I was thinking about a compressed FUSE filesystem but not sure of where to go from there...any dynamically resized compressed FUSE filesystem out there?

Currently I'm experimenting on an external mechanical HDD.to save some durability while I try to work a solution to squeezing it all on 4GB. I plan on trimming all the extra locales...wow that uses a lot of space... And see if I can reduce disk writes during normal use as much as possible..._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed watching?

Hmm... I never thought of using a squashfs+unionfs which is what that wiki appears to be doing, sounds like a good idea, thanks.

Anyone have comments about using this scheme? Might have to do this on my full size machines too..._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed watching?

you could also compile on a different machine and just make packages, and install the packages on your eeepc_________________A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

hmm... not exactly what I need, I think they're default anyway. These are probably all the /usr/share/doc files which mostly will be manually deleted anyway

Well, again, I'd like to let my eee to be mostly self-hosting, meaning having a full portage tree. Besides, the USE flags on this machine is different than all my other machines, so build cross contamination will be annoying, unless I have a whole chroot (which has its issues...unresolved... like the rm issue...)

I'll definitely be using PORTAGE_TMPDIR a lot (when I have an external mechanical disk handy) but mostly I hope it will be able to build on the SSD when it can._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed watching?

At the cost of flash drives these days what about an 4 or 8gig usb flashdrive, they are cheap, not the fastest for writing, but to store the tree and such will read fast enough and leave more room on your ssd for compiling, etc..